Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World — Cal Newport

In college, a guy who lived on my floor and spent seemingly all day every day on his computer, doing not much of anything, always with a browser window open and perpetually scrolling, searching, watching, surfing, or reading—for what I don’t know. I don’t think he knew. There seemed to be no purpose in his activities. I’d ask him sometimes what he was doing, and he never had a real good answer. I don’t remember his name.

The difference between that guy then is that he was seen as an isolated weirdo loser (I think, anyway). Now, the way he lives has become for many of us the way we all live. For that reason Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World is, properly read, an indictment of me and probably of you. Because it’s an indictment it can be hard to read because it wounds through its accurate dissection of the way many of us live—or rather, don’t live. Newport writes:

Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity. We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities. Deep work, in other words, was exactly the type of effort needed to stand out in a cognitively demanding field. . . .

Deep work isn’t only about your “current intellectual capacity”—it’s about improving and developing that intellectual capacity. Your current intellectual capacity probably isn’t and shouldn’t be your final intellectual capacity. Yet:

The ubiquity of deep work among influential individuals is important to emphasize because it stands in sharp contract to the behavior of most modern knowledge workers—a group that’s rapidly forgetting the value of going deep.

The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools. This is a broad category that captures communication services like e-mail and SMS, social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, and the shiny tangle of infotainment sites like BuzzFeed and Reddit

Sound familiar? Maybe too familiar? It does to me. I’ve gone through periods of very intense deep work and periods of very little deep work. I know what the habits of both look like and I also know the temptations of the shallows. Many of you probably do too, but the reinforcement Newport offers is useful, like a reminder that sugar is terrible. We know. But we need to move from knowing to implementing change. Deep Work covers both.

Newport is not arguing for an all-work-all-the-time approach, and he knows that doing the max necessitates some downtime. I also think there is some important balance necessary between radical “openness” (random browsing, searching, connecting, that sort of thing) and radical “closedness” (shutting the door, solitude, going deep within the self to create). The radically open never get anything important done, like major software, books, articles, essays, or projects. The radically closed probably need an influx of new ideas, influences, concepts, and techniques. Too much of either is a detriment, but I myself am probably now too “open” in this sense.

In almost any finite system, one question should be, “What is the scarce resource here?” For most of us, it’s probably not excessive closedness.

To be sure, I learn much from the Internet, Hacker News, blogs, and so forth, but it is often too tempting to do shallow to medium-depth reading at the expense of more substantive projects. It’s too rare for me to do really deep reading—or writing. I know the problems: “Among other insights, [Clifford] Nass’s research revealed that constant attention switching online has a lasting negative effect on your brain” and I know the solutions. But the implementation can be hard.

Students report shocking (to me) levels of interest in and keeping up with Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and others. I don’t want this to turn into a “kids these days” essay, in which I wave my cane and tell everyone to get off my damn lawn, but it does seem like it’d be hard to accomplish much with the endless background noise forever buzzing. Then again, I see my friends engage the same behaviors, so maybe age is less a factor than I might think at first. We have all the world’s information in our hands, but what do we do with it? That’s a key question underlying Newport’s book—and all of our lives.

Great post. I agree that reflection regarding the sources we consume and how critically (intensive, deep) we process them for developing our capabilities is key to synthesize deeper knowledge. All the best!